The end of the world party is over... and now you have to go to work

The end of the world party is over... and now you have to go to work

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The end is nigh: Emma Blackwood, lead singer in Anarchist Wood (Picture: Nigel Howard)

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Anarchist Wood: the band played an apocalyptic set (Picture: Nigel Howard)

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Revellers: fans jovially await doomsday (Picture: Nigel Howard)

The fact you’re reading this is proof that, despite the Mayan prophecy, the world didn’t end today.

While there was some confusion over the precise time of the predicted apocalypse, in New Zealand the first clocks ticked past midnight without a hint of global destruction.

Neither was the French village of Bugarach taken over by aliens carting the chosen few off to a different

dimension.

New Agers, hippies and UFO watchers who arrived in the tiny hamlet in the foothills of the Pyrenees, believing it to be the only place that would survive the apocalypse, were left disappointed as the moment came and went.

More than 200 journalists sent there to report on the destruction had to make do with news of biggest threat the police confronted — a Taser-brandishing hippy trying to breach roadblocks to get to the Pic de Bulgarach, the mountain where Doomsday believers expected a giant UFO to emerge and whisk them to a new life.

The 189 residents of Bugarach now hope normal life will resume after weeks of media attention and a security operation that cost the police hundreds of thousands of pounds. More than 100 officers enforced a no-go area around the mountain and potholers checked underground tunnels and caves. A team of psychological counsellors was on hand to help with the sense of anti-climax.

In London, hundreds of revellers who attended an “Apocalypse Party” at a pub in Bethnal Green last night had to put in a full shift at work today.

Meanwhile hundreds of druids, pagans and other tourists descened on Stonehenge to celebrate the winter solstice - the shortest day - at 11.11am this morning.

In Australia, the government’s official tourism page on Facebook was flooded with tens of thousands of “likes” last night after it posted a status update at 11.12am their time saying: “Yes. we’re alive.”